It's that time of year

Eric always said that the first trees to change colour are found on Notch road in Chelsea. And he was right. I noticed the one tree, the one that always changes first, was turning red about two weeks ago. Each day I drove past it to go to work, it was turning more and more and then today I noticed the other trees around it following suit. I know it's early, but with the recent cooler temperatures - especially at night, the darker mornings and the trees on Notch... something tells me it's that time of year. The end of summer (I hear gasps and boos coming from the audience). Let us all have a moment...

Ok, as you may know I've stated scanning old slides, photos and film. I just did a batch of old negative films from my Mum dating back to the 1940s. They were in surprisingly good condition considering they've been kept in an envelope for the past 60 years, only having a few scratches and marks. It's been fun to scan the film negative and see what pops up on the screen. They are shots of my Mum, her sister and brother, as well as a few of her Mom and a couple of her Dad. I'll sit down with my Mum this weekend to tag each photo with information on the history and dates. In addition to scanning, I'll have to do a little restoration work, as some of them are over, or under-exposed, they are scratched or have lots of dust.

Here is a sample of the SOOS (Straight out of Scanner):

As you can see it's quite under-exposed, crooked, and what you can't see is that it's got some noise and dust. While I didn't have the time, or patience right now to remove every spec of dust - I still haven't reached that chapter in the book - I did do some global fix it's and came up with this:

It shows that there is a lot of detail not seen in the original scan, and show the potential of what can be done. So don't ever think that a negative or slide is lost... unless it looks something like this:

Unfortunately in this case it was too over-exposed and there wasn't enough "data" in the blown out areas to recover it. It's too bad because it's one of the only photos of my grandmother and grandfather I scanned.

It's been really fun discovering all these old images and I hope to share more with you in the weeks to come! A couple things that I've quickly learned from working through this process which we could all apply now: 1) take more photos of yourself... if you are like me, I'm always behind the camera - like my grandfather was 2) document, document, document. Document the time, place, ages, etc. It's a little easier now because of the metadata included with each digital photo taken, but there is so much more to a photo that the date!